If you want better results from your blogging, you might be trying various kinds of promotion on social media. Promotion should certainly be on your list, but if you’re not getting as much traction from your efforts as you would expect, try returning to your blog ideas themselves.

The beauty of the following 4-step method for generating ideas is that the seed comes from you and the keywords you are targeting, but you will use real data to inform your decisions. It makes it clear whether or not you should go ahead with writing a particular piece of content, or what angle to take with it. It’s a method that can save you and your business a lot of time, money, and effort. And it will prevent you from diluting a website with content that is not on target.

Whether you are managing content creation for one business or overseeing digital marketing for many blogs, this method, which is based on real search data, will help you focus your marketing efforts on content that works and you’ll get real results.

Step 1: Discover a keyword with opportunity.

The first thing you need to do is to choose the best keywords for your content. The best keywords are those that your target audience are using. They are what people type into Google when they are searching for the products, services, and subject areas that are catered for by the business for which you are managing content. This is where a lot of people stop their keyword research. Digging deeper, however, yields results.

Try your chosen keywords in Moz’s keyword explorer to identify how well they are likely to perform for you. Moz will also make keyword suggestions based on your choices. From this pool, you’ll want to prioritize the keywords with ‘high opportunity’ and ‘low difficulty.’ These are the keywords that will allow you to reach people most effectively. This data is based on a number of metrics, including how many people are searching for those terms and the competition for them among content creators.

Note that it can be worth chasing low volume keywords if the people searching for them are your target audience. It’s better to attract smaller numbers of correctly-targeted visitors than vast numbers of visitors who are much more likely to be disappointed by a site that is irrelevant to their needs.

Step 2: Find a topic idea.

When you have selected the keywords with the most potential for generating targeted traffic, it’s time to work out the angle that you or your content creators will use to incorporate those keywords into content. Not all topics are created equal. To dramatically increase your reach, combine your keywords with the most popular and appropriate topics for your audience.

Use Answer The Public to find topic ideas based on the keywords you have identified. This website’s algorithm produces an easy-to-use graphic and lists based on your topic. It’s fast and a great starting point to help you answer the needs of your audience.

Step 3: Choose the best type of content.

You have your keywords and you have your topic. The next decision to make is how you will present this information to your audience.

Epicenter’s Epictions Epicbeat has a variety of resources that will help you direct your marketing efforts. For our purposes, go to ‘Content Insights’ and then ‘Content Types’ to discover what type of content has the best potential for creating engagement. Again, the key thing here is that these results are based on actual data.

In our example, we can see that ‘guides’ and ‘how-to articles’ are the most successful content types for the subject of generating blog post ideas. ‘Why’ type articles, on the other hand, have not created much engagement for this topic.

What can we learn from this? These results may tell us that people already know why they need to generate blog post ideas. The results suggest that what people need is ideas on how to go about generating the ideas.

Step 4: Create a headline that gets clicks.

This is the final part of this 4-step method to generating content ideas that give you results. It’s time to fine tune your headline.

You could consider headlines the gatekeepers of your content. Posts with the most engaging headlines are opened more often than those with poor headlines, regardless of the work that went into producing the content. Nobody gets to see the content if they are not compelled to click on the headline.

To get more clicks, use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. Try out headline ideas and see which are most likely to perform best and why. After only a few minutes, you’ll learn more about the components of great headlines. This knowledge will serve you well throughout your work.

You’ll see that your headline should consist of a balance of common, uncommon, emotional, and power words. It will also assess your headline by its length, to ensure that it is scannable and easy to digest. Analysis of your headline’s type will provide you with more information on how well your headline is likely to convert.

With a little practice, you’ll begin to find it easy to construct headlines that move people to share and click. You’ll also be able to have existing headlines rewritten to increase engagement with posts that are under-performing.

Having a good idea for blog content is a great start. Now you have the information and resources to back your ideas up with real data. Follow this 4-step method for all your content creation work to ensure that your digital marketing efforts always stand the best chance of success.

Optimize Your Content

Now it's time to write high-quality content will lead to more conversions and shares. When you are ready to take your content creation further, try these content analysis tools. Having created engaging ideas and headlines, these tools will help you to ensure that the content delivers on your promises.

Promote Your Content

And once you publish a blog post, make the most of your work by giving it the push it deserves. An evergreen blog post keeps working day and night. Launch each post right and give it the best chance of success by learning how you can market that blog post for 10 weeks!